No, I think integrating the web stack in a terminal is one of the better options. You'll get a lot of nice things that already work, e.g. serialization (HTML/CSS/JS/JSON), debugging (webkit dev tools, if you use webkit to render you terminal), libraries that are useful for terminal based apps (d3.js) and nice font rendering to only name a few.

`cat 50mbfile` will not halt a web based terminal if you don't keep it all in the scrollback buffer.